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On Blair bulletin boards, fans and foes gather around the Internet cracker barrel to swap certainties. "Seeing The Blair Witch Project is the most terrifying experience, cinematic or otherwise, that I've ever had in my life," JJ-Spaceboy posted last week. RHinkley demurred: "I snuck in and I still felt ripped off." And SRKROL got that familiar trepidation: "The bad thing about it is the fact that I live in a heavily wooded area, with a cemetery dating back to the 1750s half a block away, it's really late, and my three dogs need to go for a walk. I think they can wait 'til daylight..."
The biggest Blair Witch shock has been felt by the movie's directors. "When we did the film," Sanchez says, "we hoped for a video or cable deal. When Artisan told us the film would be released in theaters, we were thinking, 'Man, if we make $10 million, it'd be a dream come true. But to do $29 million in one weekend was so beyond our comprehension. If anyone had said that a year ago, we would have had him committed."
"Now hold on," say the six of you who are just back from Borneo. "Blair which?" For you, and for those who have seen the movie and still don't get it, a little backstory. Or, as they say, mythology.
Myrick, 35, a native Floridian from Sarasota, and Sanchez, 30, who hails from Maryland and attended Montgomery College there, met in 1990 while film students at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. A few years ago, Myrick says, "we got on the subject of old documentaries like In Search Of... and Chariot of the Gods and a 1972 feature called The Legend of Boggy Creek--all these pseudodocumentary programs that really creeped us out when we were kids. Later on, we came up with the premise of the three filmmakers' getting lost in the woods. Our movie would be about the found footage. From there it germinated into building this mythology."
The premise: the town of Burkittsville, once Blair, is haunted by stories of a witch who for two centuries lured children to her home and, so the legend goes, made some of them face the wall while she killed the others. For a film project, three Montgomery College students have come to Burkittsville to shoot a documentary project. They'll interview the locals and spend a couple of days tracking down the witch's house in the nearby woods.
The three--director Heather Donahue, cameraman Joshua Leonard and sound man Michael Williams (the actors use their real names)--think it will be a lark, but they have underestimated the legend's potency and overestimated their own skills in camping and coping. Within a day or two, they are lost and sawing on one another's frayed nerves. At night, huddled in their tent, they begin to suspect menace from someone or something outside. Could it be the Blair Witch? They hear noises, feel a rattling of the tent, find three small cairns and twigs bundled in an ominous symbol and, one morning, notice slime all over Josh's backpack. One of the three disappears. The remaining two finally come upon the witch's house, and there...
Through it all, they kept filming and videotaping the ordeal. A year after their disappearance, their footage was found...